Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
Volume 22 | Issue 1
Article 1
5-8-2013
Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and the Slave
Rebellion Tradition
Douglas M. Coulson
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Coulson, Douglas M. (2010) "Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and the Slave Rebellion Tradition," Yale Journal of Law & the
Humanities: Vol. 22: Iss. 1, Article 1.
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Coulson: Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and the Slave Rebellion Tradition
Articles
Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and
the Slave Rebellion Tradition
Douglas M. Coulson*
This Article reexamines Herman Melville's short story "Benito Cereno, " in which the "true history"
of the story's events is only revealed to the readerat the end of the story through lengthy extractsfrom
the official deposition of Benito Cereno, captain of the slave ship San Dominick, who testifies that a
slave revolt resulted in the deaths of numerous Spaniards and slaves on board. The deposition
extracts through which this history is presented to the reader contain numerous defects and
contradictions that have troubled critics. This Article reexamines the reliability of the deposition
extracts through the lens of the exaggeration, distortion, and censorship that characterizethe records
of historicalslave rebellions. The Article argues that the parallels between the deposition extracts in
"Benito Cereno " and the unique historiographicalproblems raised by the records of historicalslave
rebellions have been largely overlooked by critics and provide a basis for reexamining whether the
deposition extracts in factprovide the "true history " of the story andfor reevaluatingsuggestions of a
conspiracy between the Spaniardsand slaves in the story. The Article also concludes that by using a
deliberately defective official document to end "Benito Cereno," Melville provides important
commentary regardingthe authorship and distortion of official records in slave rebellion trials and
the autonomous agency on which law, narrative,and history depend
The document selected, from among many others, for partial
translation,contains the deposition of Benito Cereno, the first taken in the
case. Some disclosures therein were, at the time, held dubious for both
learned and naturalreasons. The tribunalinclinedto the opinion that the
deponent, not undisturbed in his mind by recent events, raved of some
things which could never have happened
Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno"
*Assistant Instructor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, The University of Texas at Austin; M.A.,
2009, The University of Texas at Austin; J.D., 1999, Tulane Law School; M.L.A., 1996, Oklahoma
City University; B.A., 1995, Oklahoma City University. Associate, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres &
Friedman LLP, 2001-2008. This Article began in a Fall 2007 graduate seminar in Melville and Early
American Literature taught by Martin Kevorkian at the University of Texas at Austin. I would like to
particularly thank Martin Kevorkian for his generous support and thoughtful comments on this project
both during and after the seminar and the other seminar participants for their comments on an early
version of the Article presented during the seminar. I would also like to thank my family, friends, and
colleagues who have commented on various drafts of the article, including Richard Coulson, Mary
Coulson, Jamie Cooper, and Christian Shippee, as well as Stephanie Cha and the other editors at the
Yale Journalof Law and the Humanities,whose insightful editing was invaluable.
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Putnam's Monthly Magazine first published Herman Melville's short
story "Benito Cereno" in three monthly installments on October 1,
November 1, and December 1, 1855.2 In the first two installments, a
limited third person narrator tells the story of American Captain Amasa
Delano boarding the Spanish slave ship San Dominick off the coast of
Chile in 1799 after he notices its erratic movement in the harbor of St.
Maria and its dangerously close approach to land.3 Upon boarding the San
Dominick, Delano is greeted by a "clamorous throng of whites and blacks"
who tell a "common tale of suffering." The nearly incapacitated Spanish
captain of the San Dominick, Don Benito Cereno, explains to Delano that
the ship ran into storms off Cape Horn followed by sultry calms that left
the ship adrift and at the mercy of scurvy and fever, resulting in the deaths
of many of the Spaniards and slaves on board, including the slaves' owner
Alexandro Aranda. 4 After Delano sends his whale-boat back to his ship
the Bachelor's Delight to retrieve supplies for the San Dominick, Delano
is entertained by Cereno, whose slave Babo is constantly by Cereno's side,
at times physically supporting Cereno during periodic fainting spells
which Delano attributes to Cereno's near incapacity from the ill-fated
voyage.
Throughout this early part of the story, Delano finds the relationship
between the Spaniards and slaves on the San Dominick deeply disturbing.
Despite Delano's offer of assistance to the San Dominick, Cereno initially
greets Delano passively, with an "unhappy glance," and during Delano's
stay on the San Dominick Cereno has a "gloomy hesitancy and
subterfuge" about him.5 When on two occasions Delano observes the
slaves violently striking the Spaniards on board, Cereno does nothing to
stop the violence, dismissing it on one occasion as "merely the sport of the
lad," and when Cereno and Babo step away from Delano to whisper
together in low voices, Delano notes that they have "the air of
conspirators" about them and begins to feel "a ghostly dread" of Cereno,
suspecting him of a piratical scheme. 6 In the third installment of the story,
however, as the supplies arrive and Delano prepares to return to the
Bachelor's Delight, Cereno dramatically leaps over the bulwarks of the
San Dominick into Captain Delano's whale-boat the Rover followed first
by three Spanish sailors and then by Babo and "the whole host of
1.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Benito Cereno, in THE PIAZZA TALES 103 (Northwestern University
Press, 2000) (1856).
2. LEA BERTANI VOZAR NEWMAN, A READER'S GUIDE TO THE SHORT STORIES OF HERMAN
MELVILLE 95 (1986).
3. MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 46-47.
4. Id.at48-56.
5. Id. at 51,68.
6. Id.at 59, 63-68, 70.
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negroes," who, "as if inflamed at the sight of their jeopardized captain,
impended in one sooty avalanche over the bulwarks." 7 Later, Cereno
claims that the slaves had revolted at sea and forced him to tell Delano the
story of storms and scurvy under threat of death if he revealed the truth of
the revolt, but this account is only provided to the reader of "Benito
Cereno" indirectly, through lengthy extracts from an official transcript of
Cereno's deposition taken before the vice-regal courts in Lima, Peru,
where the revolt "underwent investigation" after the San Dominick was
recaptured by the American sailors. 8
The narrator introduces the deposition extracts, which constitute
approximately half of the final installment of the story, by noting that "it is
hoped" the deposition will, retrospectively, reveal the "true history" of the
San Dominick's voyage, and "if the Deposition have served as the key to
fit the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose
door has been flung back, the San Dominick's hull lies open today." 9
While critics have largely accepted Cereno's deposition testimony as the
"true history" of the San Dominick's voyage and examined "Benito
Cereno" as a commentary on the politics of slavery, some critics have
noted that the deposition extracts are "deliberately defective,"'" contain
"many unsolved contradictions,"'" and "raise more questions than they
answer," 12 perhaps not unlike the hull of the San Dominick at the
beginning of the story, a "shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep,
which directly must receive back what it gave."' 3 A close examination of
the deposition extracts and the facts and circumstances surrounding them
reveals serious doubts not only about the transcript's account of the San
Dominick's voyage and the claim that a slave revolt occurred, but also
about the transcript's integrity as an official record. Significantly, these
doubts parallel unique historiographical problems raised by the records of
the historical slave rebellion trials that form the primary literary tradition
of "Benito Cereno." Thus, despite one reader's complaint to the editor of
Putnam 's Monthly Magazine that "it is a great pity [Melville] did not work
[the story] up as a connected tale instead of putting in the dreary
documents at the end,"' 4 Melville's use of the "dreary documents" at the
7. Id. at 98-115.
8. Id. at 102. Immediately after leaping into the Rover, Cereno fell into a "speechless faint." Id. at
99.
9. Id. at 103, 114.
10. Robert A. Ferguson, Untold Stories in the Law, in LAW'S STORIES: NARRATIVE AND
RHETORIC INTHE LAW 97 (Peter Brooks & Paul Gewirtz eds., 1996).
I1. Oliver Scheiding, Subversions of ProvidentialHistoriographyin Herman Melville's 'Benito
Cereno', in RE-VISIONING THE PAST: HISTORICAL SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN AMERICAN SHORT FICTION
123 (Bernd Engler & Oliver Scheiding eds., 1998).
12. EDGAR A. DRYDEN, MELVILLE'S THEMATICS OF FORM: THE GREAT ART OF TELLING THE
TRUTH 202 (1968).
13. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 50.
14. WARNER BERTHOFF, THE EXAMPLE OF MELVILLE 153 (1962).
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end of "Benito Cereno" provides important commentary on the authorship
and distortion of records of slave rebellion trials and the presumption of
autonomous agency on which law, narrative, and history depend.
This Article will explore these implications of "Benito Cereno" and
argue that despite numerous parallels prior critics have noted between the
story and historical slave rebellions-including parallels between the story
and the Creole and Amistad mutinies, the San Domingo rebellion of 1799,
and the Gabriel rebellion of 1800'-the parallels between the deposition
extracts at the end of the story and the distortions that characterized the
official records of historical slave rebellion trials provide the most
important explanation of the transcript's function in the story. As Herbert
Aptheker observes in American Negro Slave Revolts, slave rebellion
narratives were frequently characterized by "exaggeration, distortion, and
censorship,"' 6 and the authorities presiding over slave rebellion trials often
conducted their proceedings in secret, used inquisitorial procedures to
interrogate witnesses, and distorted official records. This Article will
illustrate these features in the records of two notorious slave rebellion
trials-The Confessions of Nat Turner and the Official Report of the
Denmark Vesey conspiracy trials-and examine similar features in the
deposition extracts at the end of "Benito Cereno," arguing that the parallel
between the story and historical slave rebellion records provides a basis
for reexamining whether the deposition extracts in fact provide the "true
history" of the story and for reevaluating suggestions of conspiracy
between the Spaniards and slaves in the story. The Article will conclude
by discussing how such a reexamination of the deposition extracts also
illuminates the role of autonomous agency in the legal process.
I. THE HISTORICAL SLAVE REBELLION TRADITION
By the time Melville wrote "Benito Cereno" in the 1850s, slave
rebellions had become a frequent occurrence both at sea and on land, and
slave rebellion narratives were a familiar genre in American literature. A
1937 study of documentary evidence of slave ship revolts between 1699
and 1845, for example, discovers records of fifty-five slave rebellions and
concludes that additional unreported rebellions probably occurred during
this period. 7 Slave rebellions at sea had become so prevalent, in fact, that
a special form of insurance was taken out to cover losses arising from
them. 8 As slave rebellions and unrest among slave populations rose, false
15.
Carolyn L. Karcher, The Riddle of the Sphinx: Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and the Amistad
Case, in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HERMAN MELVILLE'S "BENITO CERENO" 196-229 (Robert E.
Burkholder ed., 1992); Ferguson, supra note 10, at 97.
16. HERBERT APTHEKER, AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVE REVOLTS 150 (1978).
17. Harvey Wish, American Slave InsurrectionsBefore 1861, 22 J. NEGRO HIST. 299-320 (1937).
18. Id.
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and exaggerated slave rebellion reports also proliferated, so that in the
wake of notorious slave rebellions such as those led by Nat Turner and
John Brown, panic quickly spread to other states until at times "baseless
rumors of conspiracies, rather than actual outbreaks, seemed to be the
rule."' 9 False and exaggerated slave rebellion reports were also motivated
by a complex array of white interests such as anti-abolitionist fervor,
profits from the purchase of slaves at reduced prices in the wake of
rebellion alarms, and the concealment of crimes committed by whites,2 °
and the detection of such false reports was rendered unlikely by the
procedural laxity that characterized slave trials. 2' A close examination of
the records of two notorious slave rebellion cases-The Confessions of
Nat Turner and the Official Report of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy
trials-illustrates the unique historiographical problems raised by the
records of historical slave rebellions and their significance as a literary
tradition for the deposition extracts in "Benito Cereno."
A. The Confessions of Nat Turner
The unique historiographical problems raised by slave rebellion records
are clearly evident in the records of the Nat Turner rebellion in
Southampton, Virginia in 1831, widely regarded as the most notorious
slave rebellion in American history.
Turner was accused of
masterminding a slave rebellion that killed fifty-seven white citizens of
Southampton.
Shortly after the rebellion, attorney Thomas Gray
published The Confessions of Nat Turner as a pamphlet claiming to
represent the most authentic account of the rebellion in order to correct the
"thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports" that had quickly
spread in the public mind.22 The Confessions purport to publish Turner's
own words, "fully and voluntarily made" with "little or no variation,"23 but
they met with almost immediate skepticism due to the "eloquent, even
classical" language attributed to Turner,24 such as the following complex
grammatical structures unlikely to be encountered in spoken dialogue:
In my childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible
impression on my mind, and laid the ground work of that enthusiasm,
which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and
19. 1d. at315.
20. Aptheker, supra note 16, at 152-55; ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REBELLION
252-53 (Junius P. Rodriguez ed., 2007); Wish, supra note 17, at 313.
21. MARK TusHNET, THE AMERICAN LAW OF SLAVERY, 1810-1860: CONSIDERATIONS OF
HUMANITY AND INTEREST 122 (1981) (establishing that "special courts were established for the trial
of minor slave crimes, and procedural nicety was not always demanded in those courts").
22.
Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, in SLAVE NARRATIVES 245 (William L.
Andrews & Henry Louis Gates, Jr. eds., 2000).
23. Id. at 245.
24.
David F. Allmendinger, Jr., The Construction of The Confessions of Nat Turner, in NAT
TURNER: A SLAVE REBELLION INHISTORY AND MEMORY 37-38 (Kenneth S. Greenberg ed., 2003).
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for which I am about to atone at the gallows. It is here necessary to
relate this circumstance-trifling as it may seem, it was the
commencement of that belief which has grown with time, and even
now, sir, in this 25dungeon, helpless and forsaken as I am, I cannot
divest myself of.
Similarly, the Confessions attribute to Turner the claim that "I sometimes
got in sight in time to see the work of death completed, viewed the
mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started
in quest of other victims. ' '26 These and other passages of the Confessions
appear to reflect at best an edited rather than a verbatim transcription of
any confession Turner may have made.
There are additional reasons to doubt the authenticity of the
Confessions, however. Although not apparent on the face of the
Confessions, Thomas Gray was not Nat Turner's attorney, but rather a
court-appointed attorney for other slaves prosecuted for participating in
the rebellion.27
Accordingly, Gray had a significant interest in
establishing that Turner, rather than his own clients, was responsible for
the rebellion. Furthermore, Gray faced significant financial difficulties at
the time and appears to have seized on the lucrative financial prospects of
publishing Turner's confession. Gray was admitted to the Virginia bar in
December 1830, less than a year before the Confessions were published,2 8
and shortly before the rebellion he suffered "financial ruin," compounded
by the probate of his father's will that "cut him out completely" and the
death of his wife, which left him to care for an infant daughter. 29 Despite
purporting to be an official document, as reflected in the declaration of the
court clerk on the first page of the Confessions that the document is "a true
copy, from the record of the District Court," the declaration also states that
Gray claims the right as proprietor of the work under the Copyright Act,
and within two days of the trial Gray sought a publisher.3" These
circumstances indicate Gray had significant financial motives to dramatize
Turner's role in the rebellion. Indeed, the Confessions undoubtedly turned
a profit for Gray, as they were widely popular in the South, with as many
as 50,000 copies distributed by 1861.3'
The consonance between Turner's Confessions and Gray's own
investigations prior to his interview of Turner also casts serious doubt on
the authenticity of the Confessions. Before obtaining Turner's confession,
25.
26.
Gray, supra note 22, at 249.
Id.at 257.
27.
Daniel S.Fabricant, Thomas R. Gray and William Styron: Finally, A CriticalLook at the 1831
Confessions of Nat Turner, 37 AM. J. LEG. HIST. 333 (1993); Allmendinger, supra note 24, at 35.
28. Fabricant, supra note 27, at 340.
29. Id.
30. Gray, supra note 22, at 244; Allmendinger, supra note 24, at 24.
31.
Fabricant, supra note 27, at 332; HENRY IRVING TRAGLE, THE SOUTHAMPTON SLAVE
REVOLT OF 1831: A COMPILATION OF SOURCE MATERIAL 279 (1971).
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Gray had conducted an extensive investigation of the rebellion, and in a
September 26, 1831 letter to the Richmond Constitutional Whig, he
published many of the details later contained in the Confessions.3 2 Gray
had publicly ridiculed the notion of a widespread conspiracy, arguing for a
local conspiracy instead,33 and much as his Constitutional Whig letter had
referred to Turner as the "ringleader" of the rebellion, 34 Gray's
Confessions describe Turner as the "leader of the late insurrections in
Southampton," the "leader of this ferocious band," the "contriver and
head," and the "author" of the revolt. 35 Furthermore, although in his
preface to the Confessions, Gray claims that during Turner's incarceration
36
he "fully and voluntarily" confessed "without being questioned at all,",
the Confessions contain numerous indications that Gray questioned Turner
and specifically sought to corroborate Gray's version of the rebellion. In
the opening lines of the Confessions, for example, Turner states, "you
have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to
undertake the late insurrection, as you call it," and the text expressly
evidences numerous questions posed by Gray.3 7 Moreover, the final
section of the Confessions is a summary of Turner's responses to Gray's
"cross examination" after Turner was threatened that "concealment would
only bring destruction on the innocent as well as guilty, of his own color,
if he knew of any extensive or concerted plan., 38 These threats and crossexamination raise serious doubts about the confession's reliability. It is
also clear that Turner was Gray's last hope for establishing the motive and
details of the rebellion, as stated in Gray's preface to the Confessions:
The insurgent slaves had all been destroyed, or apprehended, tried
and executed, (with the exception of the leader,) without revealing
any thing at all satisfactory, as to the motives which governed them,
or the means by which they expected to accomplish their object.
Every thing connected with this sad affair was wrapt in mystery, until
Nat Turner, the leader of this ferocious band, whose name has
resounded throughout our widely extended empire, was captured.39
Thus, not only was Turner the only means left of establishing the motives
behind the rebellion and how it was implemented, including the local
conspiracy Gray had advocated, but none of the slaves involved in the
rebellion remained to contradict the account attributed to Turner in the
32.
Fabricant, supra note 27, at 344-46; Allmendinger, supra note 24 at 24, 32-37; Letter from
Thomas Gray (Sep. 26, 1831), reprinted in THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER AND RELATED
DOCUMENTS 78 (Kenneth S. Greenberg ed., 1996).
33. Allmendinger, supra note 24, at 35.
34. Greenberg, supra note 32, at 79.
35. Gray, supra note 22, at 243, 245, 262.
36. Id. at 249.
37. Id. at 249,250-251,253-54, 258, 260-61.
38. Id. at 261.
39. Id. at 245.
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Confessions.
Finally, although the Confessions claim to have been read and
acknowledged by Turner during his trial and bear the seal of the Clerk of
the County Court of Southampton, Virginia, there is no evidence in the
official trial record that the Confessions were read to or acknowledged by
Turner.4 ° Instead, the trial record reflects that Justice of the Peace James
Trezvant testified during Turner's trial to what Turner said during a
private pretrial interrogation in his cell conducted by Trezvant and another
justice.4 ' This interrogation followed a common interrogation practice of
early English justices of the peace "to allow the justices, in secret
proceedings of an inquisitorial nature, to build a case against the
defendant."42 It is worth noting, however, that out of more than fifty trials
involving the rebellion, Turner's was the only one in which a sitting
justice provided testimony.43 Moreover, although the trial record only
indicates that Turner "pleaded not guilty,"'
according to Gray's
Confessions, Turner pleaded "not guilty; saying to his counsel, that he did
not feel so,"45 suggesting the emotional plea of an individualist romantic
hero rather than a not guilty plea based on a denial of fact or law.
Accordingly, this passage of the Confessions may have been inserted not
only to render the plea consistent with Turner's confession to leading the
rebellion, but to dramatize Turner's romantic appeal to Gray's audience.
B. The Official Report of the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy Trials
Similar problems are reflected in the records of the Denmark Vesey
conspiracy trials of 1822, in which Vesey and 130 slaves were charged
with planning a vast conspiracy to set fire to the city of Charleston, South
Carolina, to kill all the whites in the city, and to escape by sea to the black
republic of Haiti.' The Charleston officials claimed that the Charleston
conspiracy was instigated and led by Vesey, a free black carpenter who
was raised as a slave in the Caribbean and brought to America at the age
of fourteen before ultimately purchasing his freedom with lottery
winnings.47 According to historian Michael Johnson, who conducted an
exhaustive review of the Denmark Vesey trial records in 2001, the
Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders that presided over the
Vesey conspiracy trials conducted the majority of its proceedings in secret
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Greenberg, supra note 32, at 101-03.
Fabricant, supranote 27, at 335, 343.
Id.
at 350.
Id. at 351.
Greenberg, supra note 32, at 101.
Gray, supra note 22, at 263 (emphasis in original).
46.
Michael P. Johnson, Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators, 58 WM. & MARY Q. 915
(2001).
47. Id.
at 916.
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and used "intimidation, beatings, and the threat of death to collect
testimony," so that "black witnesses knew that their words, heard by an
imposing group of white men, could send them to the gallows," while "the
right words might save them from the executioner's slipknots."4 8 Based
on Johnson's comparison of the Charleston court's Official Report to two
manuscripts containing handwritten transcriptions of the proceedings, he
concludes that the Charleston court uncritically accepted the testimony of
the slave witnesses without any corroborating evidence and that nearly all
historians to have considered the Charleston conspiracy "failed to exercise
due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the
conspiracy court."49 Similarly, in 1964 historian Richard Wade wrote of
the Charleston court's Official Report that "there is persuasive evidence
that no conspiracy in fact existed, or at most that it was a vague and
unformulated plan in the minds or on the tongues of a few colored
townsmen."5 0
Significantly, the conclusions of Johnson and Wade that no conspiracy
in fact existed also appear to have been shared by prominent
contemporaries of the trials, including United States Supreme Court
Justice William Johnson and South Carolina's Governor Thomas
Bennett. 5 Just two days after the trials began, Justice Johnson published a
newspaper article in the Charleston Courierwarning of the "Melancholy
Effect of Popular Excitement," in which he told the story of a false slave
rebellion alarm that turned violent when a drunk bugleman blew his horn
to test the effect it would have on nearby slave patrols.52 Justice Johnson
wrote that in the excitement that followed, the patrols discovered nothing
but "a single poor half-witted Negro, who had been taken crossing a field
on his way home, without instrument of war or of music," and who was
first "whipped severely to extort a confession" then threatened with death
before he finally "recollected" that a man named Billy had blown the horn
that raised the alarm.53 The authorities immediately searched Billy's
home, and upon discovering an old horn that was "covered and even filled
with cobwebs," reflecting that it had not recently been blown, they
condemned Billy to die the next day. 4 The Charleston court interpreted
Justice Johnson's article as an insinuation that it was capable of suborning
perjury and committing murder and demanded that Justice Johnson retract
his accusation, prompting an exchange of public accusations between
48.
(2002).
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
Id. at 942, 944; see also Michael P. Johnson, Reading Evidence, 59 WM. & MARY Q. 193-202
Johnson, supra note 46, at 915-16, 919, 949.
Richard C. Wade, The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,30 J. S. HIST. 150 (1964).
Johnson, supra note 46, at935-39; Wade, supra note 50, at 150-53.
Johnson, supra note 46, at 935.
Id.
Id.
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Justice Johnson and the court." Similarly, in a report delivered to South
Carolina's legislature in late 1822, South Carolina's Governor Thomas
Bennett claimed that the court's secret proceedings violated the "rules
which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial
investigation of crime," and that such proceedings were particularly
troubling in a slave conspiracy trial, which necessarily "admitted no
testimony, but such as was equivocal, the offspring of treachery or
revenge, and the hope of immunity." 56
In an apparent response to such public criticism of its proceedings, the
Charleston court published an Official Report of the Trials of Sundry
Negroes which not only includes a testimonial transcript but a preface that
provides a narrative of the rebellion constructed from the testimony. The
first sentence of the court's narrative begins: "at the head of this
conspiracy stood Denmark Vesey."5 7 The court declares that Vesey was
the "author and original instigator of this diabolical plot," and that from
him "all orders emanated," reasoning that Vesey must have been the
leader because planning such a vast conspiracy could only be
accomplished by a free man:
Being a free man [he] encountered none of those obstacles which
would have been in the way of a slave; his time was at his own
disposal, and he could go wherever he pleased, without interruption,
qualifications and advantages absolutely necessary for the Chief in a
Conspiracy, and which enabled him to travel so much about the
country as he did.58
By reasoning that Vesey must have been the leader of the conspiracy due
to his ability to travel at will, the court finds a convenient means of
connecting the participants in a vast conspiracy it appears to have either
imagined or greatly exaggerated.59
The Charleston court's Official Report of the Vesey conspiracy trials is
also prefaced by a lengthy effort to establish that the report is a complete
and unadulterated record of the proceedings:
55.
56.
Id. at 935-37.
Id. at 938.
57.
JAMES R. SCHENCK, AN OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE TRIALS OF SUNDRY NEGROES, CHARGED
WITH AN ATTEMPT TO RAISE AN INSURRECTION IN THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA: PRECEDED BY AN
INTRODUCTION AND NARRATIVE; AND IN AN APPENDIX, A REPORT OF THE TRIALS OF FOUR WHITE
PERSONS, ON INDICTMENTS FOR ATTEMPTING TO EXCITE THE SLAVES TO INSURRECTION (1822),
reprintedin THE TRIAL RECORD OF DENMARK VESEY 11 (John Oliver Killens ed., 1970).
58. Id. at 14, 17,135.
59. Somewhat similar logic animated other slave rebellion trials, such as that of Castner Hanway
for his alleged role in the Christiana Resistance in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1851, in which a crowd
of free blacks and fugitive slaves violently resisted service of a warrant by a federal marshal under the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Although the event initially prompted federal authorities to charge fortyone defendants with treason in the largest mass charge of treason in U.S. history, prosecutors only
proceeded against Castner Hanway, a white neighbor who had stood by while the resistance occurred,
based on the assumption that that Hanway must have incited the black defendants because they were
incapable of organizing on their own. Rodriguez, supra note 20, at 112-14.
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The whole evidence has been given, in each particular case, in the
order of its trial, and wherever any additional, or incidental testimony
has been disclosed against any criminal subsequent to his conviction,
sentence, or execution, it has been duly noted. The evidence is in
most cases preserved, as it was originally taken, without even
changing the phraseology, which was generally in the very words
used by the witnesses.
Although a different style might have been more agreeable to the ear,
it was supposed that this report would be considered more authentic
and satisfactory if this method were adopted. It will be perceived, in
several instances, that hearsay communications have been recorded,
and it may be imagined that they had some influence on the minds of
the Court. Such communications were only admitted under the belief
that they might lead to further discoveries, but they had no effect
whatever on the decision of the cases; and being preserved, it was
thought advisable to lay before the public the whole narrative, as it
was given by the witnesses, and not to suppress any part of it. 6°
Not only is the court's effort to defend the integrity of its proceedings in
this preface equivocal, claiming only that the evidence was preserved in its
original form "in most cases" and "generally" in the words of the
witnesses themselves, but according to Michael Johnson it is also
contradicted by the manuscript records. Johnson found that, contrary to
the Charleston court's claim that the Official Report preserved the
integrity of the evidence as originally given, the court in fact "crafted a
coherent narrative of a skillfully planned insurrection" from a "loose
jumble" of often contradictory testimony, which merely "creates the
illusion of trials by describing separate trials not present in the court
record, chopping up continuous witness testimony to make it appear to
have been given in the trials of specific defendants., 61 Furthermore, the
manuscript records themselves indicate that they are not verbatim
transcriptions of the proceedings but were written sometime after the court
sessions, and thus are, as Johnson describes, "revised versions of the
words witnesses uttered, words filtered through ears and pens belonging to
one or more unknown clerks, words that now appear with seductive clarity
in the surviving transcripts., 62 According to Johnson, "the unambiguously
legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line [in
the manuscript records] indicates that neither manuscript represents rough
notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions," but they must have been
60.
SCHENCK, supranote 57, at 1-2.
61. Johnson, supra note 46, at 934, 953.
62. Id. at 921, 925-32. Similarly, in 1964, Richard Wade noted that "the confessions of Bacchus
Hammett and John Enslow, among the few surviving original documents, have been carefully edited
in the authorized version," with some facts omitted and others added, and "even the tone of the
narrative was changed with the alterations." Wade, supra note 50, at 155.
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written later.63
Moreover, according to Johnson the discrepancies between the Official
Report and the manuscript records are not isolated occurrences. Instead, a
comparison of the Official Report with the manuscript records reveals
massive alterations. Although the Official Report includes the testimony
of five witnesses under the heading "The Trial of Denmark Vesey," and
describes dramatic encounters in which Vesey confronts and crossexamines witnesses, the manuscript records do not mention a trial of
Vesey nor do they even reflect the presence of Vesey or his counsel.'
Similarly, the Official Report reflects numerous "confessions" that do not
appear in the manuscript records and numerous alterations of specific
language contained in the manuscript transcripts:
A word-by-word comparison with the manuscript testimony discloses
that the court made thousands of changes in the Official Report,
omitting words that are present in the transcript, adding words that
are not present, and changing words, punctuation, capitalization, and
word order. In the aggregate, these changes have the effect of making
the testimony of witnesses smoother, less ambiguous, more coherent,
and-thereby-more inculpatory. The second major innovation of
the court was to publish confessions that do not appear in the
manuscript transcript. Calling routine testimony confessions and
printing confessions uttered at death's door helped the Official Report
inculpate all the defendants, whether or not they confessed, as well as
exculpate the court for any alleged irregularity or misjudgment.6 5
Johnson concludes that a more careful reading of the records in the Vesey
conspiracy trials reveals that Vesey and the other men sentenced to death
or to be sold into exile were not guilty of conspiracy, but were "victims
instead of rumors and an erroneous reading of evidence that confirmed
popular beliefs," and that Vesey himself was "the victim of a conspiracy
of collusion between the white court and the cooperative black witnesses,
both eager for their own reasons to pay homage to the enduring power of
white supremacy."66
63. Johnson, supra note 46, at 921.
64. Id. at 933.
65. Id.at 94 .
66. Id. at 916, 971. Similarly, critics have concluded public authorities fabricated other slave
rebellion conspiracies, such as the Conspiracy of the Ladder, or La Escalera, in which slaves who
were tortured following a series of slave rebellions in Cuba in the early 1840s testified to an extensive
slave conspiracy which some believe to have been "a fabrication created by the colonial government to
validate its despotic policies." Rodriguez, supranote 20, at 137-39.
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II. THE DEPOSITION EXTRACTS IN "BEN1TO CERENO"
A. Cereno 's Dubious "Ravings" and TheirDoubtful Corroboration
As indicated in the epigraph of this article, the Peruvian tribunal that
conducts the investigation of the San Dominick's voyage in "Benito
Cereno" at first doubts Cereno's testimony, concluding that it is "dubious
for both learned and natural reasons," in part because Cereno is "not
undisturbed in his mind" and "raved" (from revere, "to dream")6 7 of things
that "could never have happened."6 8 Significantly, the "raving" character
of Cereno's testimony before the Peruvian tribunal is consistent with
Delano's observations of Cereno's condition throughout the first two
installments of the story, during which Cereno tells Delano that storms and
scurvy killed the Spaniards and slaves on the San Dominick. In the first
two installments of the story, Delano describes Cereno as a "half-lunatic,"
an "involuntary victim of mental disorder" with an air of "gloomy
hesitancy and subterfuge" or "secret vindictiveness" about him, who "ever
seemed eating his own heart," with a "guilty shuffle," a "husky whisper,"
and a "twitching" face.69 Furthermore, when Cereno appears before the
Peruvian tribunal to testify, he appears "in his litter" (i.e., on a stretcher)
and is attended by a Dominican monk who "volunteered to be [Cereno's]
special guardian and consoler, day and night," and administers the
testimonial oath to Cereno.7 ° The extracts reflect that when Cereno's
testimony is completed, he is "broken in body and mind," and he dies
"three months after being dismissed by the court."'" Thus, throughout the
story Cereno's condition is described as severely debilitated, and in
several instances is specifically linked to doubts regarding his competence,
consistent with the tribunal's own doubts regarding his mental state.
The tribunal resolves its initial doubts regarding Cereno's testimony
only after the later depositions of six surviving Spanish sailors confirm
"several of the strangest particulars" of Cereno's testimony, which the
tribunal finds "gave credence to the rest," so that "the tribunal, in its final
decision, rested its capital sentences upon statements which, had they
lacked confirmation, it would have deemed it but duty to reject."72 The
testimony of the Spanish sailors, however, is as dubious as Cereno's own.
To begin with, the story does not identify which of the "strangest
particulars" of Cereno's testimony were confirmed and which were merely
67. 2 ERNEST WEEKLEY, AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH 1203 (Dover
Publications 1967) (1921).
68. MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 103.
69. Id. at 52-53, 55, 59, 63, 65-66, 68, 81.
70. Id.at 103-04.
71. Id. at 114,117.
72. Id. at 103.
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accepted without confirmation. Accordingly, the extent and reliability of
the Spanish sailors' corroboration of Cereno's testimony is unclear. In the
earlier narrative, Delano relies on a similarly partial confirmation of
Cereno's story of storms and scurvy by asking an old Spanish sailor on
deck "several questions concerning the voyage, questions purposely
referring to several particulars in Don Benito's narrative, not previously
corroborated," and "the questions were briefly answered, confirming all
that remained to be confirmed of the story."73 Moreover, throughout the
earlier narrative Cereno continually confesses an "ill opinion" and gives a
"bad account" of the Spanish sailors, impugning their character, and at one
point when Delano recalls Cereno's comment regarding the sailors' "ill
conduct," he decides not to speak to them because he is "indisposed to
74
countenance cowardice or unfaithfulness in seamen.
These concerns regarding the Spanish sailors' corroboration of Cereno's
testimony are further compounded by the fact that Cereno's deposition
was the "first taken in the case,"75 which raises the question of whether the
sailors were independently interrogated or merely asked to confirm
Cereno's version of the events, a question the text of "Benito Cereno"
does not answer. Moreover, the possibility that Melville purposefully
created this ambiguity is suggested by the fact that in the historical
account of the Tryal slave revolt on which Melville based "Benito
Cereno," 76 Delano's midshipman Don Nathaniel Luther merely confirmed
Delano's prior testimony, as reflected in Luther's deposition:
He knows that his captain, Amasa Delano, has deposed on every
thing that happened in this affair; that in order to avoid delay he
requests that his declaration should be read to him, and he will tell
whether it is conformable to the happening of the events; that if any
thing is omitted he will observe it, and add to it, doing the same if he
erred in any part thereof; and His Honour having acquiesced in this
proposal, the Declaration made this day by captain Amasa Delano,
was read to him through the medium of the Interpreter, and said, that
the deponent... knows that the narration which the captain has made
73. Id. at 72. This effort to corroborate Cereno's story of the voyage appears to reflect Delano's
partial reconsideration of his earlier conclusion that Cereno's story had been corroborated by the facial
features of the "indiscriminate multitude" when he first boarded the San Dominick: "Don Benito's
story had been corroborated not only by the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude, white
and black, but likewise-what seemed impossible to counterfeit-by the very expression and play of
every human feature, which Captain Delano saw." Id. at 69.
74. Id. at 71-72. Cf. Scheiding, supra note 11, at 127-28. It is also apparent that none of the
surviving Spanish sailors are officers, because Cereno tells Delano that a malignant fever killed "every
remaining officer on board," and no officers appear in the story. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 56.
75. Id. at 103.
76. In 1928, it was first discovered that Melville based "Benito Cereno" on significant portions of
the text from Chapter 18 of Amasa Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres, including much of the text from Benito Cereno's historical deposition
transcript. See Harold Scudder, Melville 's Benito Cereno and Captain Delano 's Voyages, 43 PROC.
MOD. LANGUAGE ASS'WN 502 (1928).
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in the deposition... is certain and exact in all its parts .... 77
Because it is unlikely that a sailor would contradict his captain's version
of the events, this method of corroboration is particularly unreliable.7 8
Thus, Cereno's deposition testimony in "Benito Cereno" appears to have
been accepted based solely on a partial confirmation by a handful of
disreputable Spanish sailors unlikely to contradict his testimony, possibly
in response to leading questions.
B. Partially TranslatedExtracts From a Summary Transcript
According to a familiar trope in Melville's prose, "this is not the half;
look again," or as Captain Ahab tells Starbuck on the quarter deck scene in
Moby-Dick, "Hark ye yet again-the little lower layer."7 9 The dubious
credibility of Cereno's raving testimony and the Spanish sailors'
questionable corroboration represent but the beginning of the doubts
regarding the deposition extracts in "Benito Cereno." The transcript also
reflects missing documents, numerous memory lapses and gaps in the
testimony, the "partial translation" of the extracts from Spanish into
English, and a host of irresolvable contradictions.8" The extracts indicate,
for example, that Cereno can only testify regarding "the most substantial
of what occurs to him at present," that "in some things his memory is
confused, he cannot distinctly recall every event," and that he omits
testimony regarding some events because they "can only serve uselessly to
recall past misfortunes."'" Furthermore, the reader is only provided with
selected extracts from Cereno's testimony rather than the complete
transcript, suggesting that a sizeable amount of testimony is not revealed.
77. AMASA DELANO, A NARRATIVE OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS IN THE NORTHERN AND
SOUTHERN HEMISPHERES: COMPRISING THREE VOYAGES ROUND THE WORLD; TOGETHER WITH A
VOYAGE OF SURVEY AND DISCOVERY, IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND ORIENTAL ISLANDS 345 (Boston:
E. G. House, 1817).
78. Courts have long provided that witnesses may be sequestered from the courtroom to prevent
them from hearing the testimony of other witnesses, a practice today referred to simply as "the rule" of
witnesses. The Federal Rules of Evidence, for example, provide that "at the request of a party the court
shall order witnesses excluded so that they cannot hear the testimony of other witnesses .... " FED. R.
EVtD. 615. This rule is a well-established means of "discouraging and exposing fabrication,
inaccuracy, and collusion," FED. R. EvID. 615 advisory committee's notes, which the United States
Supreme Court has observed goes back to "our inheritance of the common Germanic law," Geders v.
United States, 425 U.S. 80, 87 (1976), and which one federal court has commented is "at least as old
as the Bible," Frideres v. Schiltz, 150 F.R.D. 153, 158 (S.D. Iowa 1993) ("In the Biblical story of
Susanna and the Elders, Daniel exposed falsehood by insisting that the two accusers separately
describe the place where the alleged adultery occurred. When the two described different places,
Susanna was belatedly released" (citing Daniel 13:36-64)).
79. HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK, OR, THE WHALE 109, 164 (Northwestern University Press,
2001) (1851).
80. SUSAN WEINER, LAW INART 134 (1992); Alfred Konefsky, The Accidental Legal Historian:
Herman Melville and the History of American Law, 52 BUFF. L. REV. 1179 (2004); Scheiding, supra
note 11; Brook Thomas, The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel Shaw, in CRITICAL
ESSAYS ON HERMAN MELVILLE'S "BENITO CERENO" 116 (Robert E. Burkholder ed., 1992).
81. MELVILLE, supranote l,at 108, 110, 114.
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The transcript is also a summary of the testimony rather than a verbatim
transcript and is identified only as a "partial translation" from Spanish into
English, which introduces multiple layers of mediation between the
testimony and the reader. The summary form of the transcript is evident
in the fact that the testimony is recorded in the third person, using "he"
Because the
and "the deponent," rather than the first person "I."
proceedings are set in Peru in 1799, at a time when Peruvian tribunals
were governed by the civilian, or "inquisitorial," procedural tradition of
the Spanish Empire, according to which the judge alone would have
interrogated Cereno and the parties would not have been afforded an
opportunity to cross-examine him,82 Cereno's transcript is an English
translation of the judge's Spanish summary of the interrogation which the
judge would have periodically stopped to dictate during the proceedings.
Without a verbatim transcription of the testimony, because "hesitation,
other signs that the witness is lying, and even most corrections are not
recorded,"8 3 significant opportunities exist for the judge to construct the
testimony not only through leading questions but through the summary he
dictates to the reporter.
The translation of the deposition transcript from Spanish into English
also raises the possibility of erroneous translations, as illustrated by the
errors reflected in the depositions taken in the historical Tryal inquiry on
which "Benito Cereno" is based. 8' In the documents from the Tryal
inquiry, Delano apologizes for any inconsistency or "impropriety of
expression" in the transcripts, noting that his and his first mate's
depositions were translated through a "bad linguist, who could not speak
the English language so well as I could the Spanish," and he later corrects
"a mistake of the linguist" by which his midshipman Luther is erroneously
referred to as "supercargo" rather than "midshipman." 85 The deposition
transcript in "Benito Cereno" repeatedly uses the expression "the Spanish"
to describe the slave Jos6, "who speaks well the Spanish," Babo, who
"understands well the Spanish," and "some others who were constantly on
the watch, and likewise understood the Spanish, ' 86 which suggests the
82. See HENRY CHARLES LEA, SUPERSTITION AND FORCE: ESSAYS ON THE WAGER OF LAWTHE WAGER OF BATTLE-THE ORDEAL-TORTURE 513 (2003); JOHN HENRY MERRYMAN, THE CIVIL
LAW TRADITION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LEGAL SYSTEMS OF WESTERN EUROPE AND LATIN
AMERICA 126-28 (2d ed. 1985). As Henry Charles Lea describes the inquisitorial criminal procedure
of fifteenth-century France, "the whole investigation was in the hands of the government official, who
examined every witness by himself, and secretly, the prisoner having no knowledge of what was done,
and no opportunity of arranging a defense." LEA, supra, at 513.
83. Paul Storm, The Netherlands, in OBTAINING EVIDENCE IN ANOTHER JURISDICTION IN
BUSINESS DISPUTES 112 (Charles Platto & Michael Lee eds., 2d ed. 1993).
84. DELANO, supra note 77, at 331. While the transcripts generated by civilian authorities rarely
conform to the precise expression of witnesses, translated testimony is particularly problematic and
frequently recorded both incompletely and erroneously. HEIKKI E.S. MATILA, COMPARATIVE LEGAL
LINGUISTICS 37 (Christopher Goddard trans., Ashgate 2006) (2002).
85. DELANO, supra note 77, at 331, 350.
86.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 104, 110.
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translator was not entirely fluent in English. Accordingly, not only does
the summary form of the transcript omit hesitation and other
idiosyncrasies of Cereno's testimony, but the translation further removes
any particularities of expression that may have existed in the original, a
problem Melville specifically highlighted by including nonstandard
grammatical forms in the transcript.
The translated and summary form of the deposition extracts also reflects
a pattern of fragmented narration that appears on nearly every level of
"Benito Cereno." The earlier narrative is also a translated summary,
because Delano provides only "the substance" of Cereno's story, which
was "very brokenly delivered," and Delano apparently translates the story
from Spanish into English, a fact that is revealed when Delano notes in the
second installment of the story that an old man on deck speaks to him in
"broken English,-the first heard in the ship."87 Similarly, the deposition
extracts in "Benito Cereno" are interrupted by ellipses and interlineations
that do not appear in the historical Cereno's deposition transcript but were
added by Melville to create an aura of incompleteness around the
testimony, 88 and at the end of the story the narrator apologizes that the
narrative has been "retrospectively, or irregularly given."8 9 Accordingly,
it is apparent that the fragmented and mediated quality of the deposition
extracts in the story form part of a larger stylistic theme of "Benito
Cereno."
C. Crucial Testimony Based on Hearsay of the Slaves'Account of the
Revolt
But in the words of Captain Ahab, "hark ye yet again-the little lower
layer," or as the narrator of "Benito Cereno" describes the opening scene
of the story, "shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come."90
A careful reading of the deposition extracts also reveals that the most
crucial extract of Cereno's "ravings," the corroboration of which "gave
credence to the rest" of his testimony, consists almost entirely of hearsay
based on the pretrial statements of slaves and missing documents.
Hearsay testimony generally consists of any statement, other than one
87. Id. at 56, 76.
88. Edgar Dryden notes that from its opening scene, "Benito Cereno" presents "a world composed
entirely of surfaces, with all of its parts mixed and confused":
Shadows here do not lead to essential forms but to "deeper shadows." Sky and sea are almost
indistinguishable and both seem equally artificial. The sea, product of a smelter's mould, is "laid out
and leaded up," "soul gone, defunct"; and the "surtout" sky is the first of a series of sinister, artificial
coverings. Like the "San Dominick," which seems a "shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep,"
nature also is composed of an enigmatic set of shadows and surfaces which apparently conceal some
terrifying secret.
DRYDEN, supra note 12, at 206.
89. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 114.
90. MELVILLE, supra note 79, at 164; MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 46.
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made by a witness while testifying at a trial or hearing, offered in evidence
to prove the truth of the matter asserted, and because the value of hearsay
does not derive solely from the credibility of the witness testifying but
instead from the veracity and competency of others, it is generally
inadmissible subject to specifically recognized exceptions. 9 In "Benito
Cereno," the narrator's interlineations of Cereno's deposition extracts
specifically identify a particular extract as that which contains the record
of the slaves' "individual part in the past events, with a view to furnishing,
according to command of the court, the data whereon to found the
criminal sentences." 92 This language closely parallels the narrator's
earlier reference to statements on which the tribunal "rested its capital
sentences" after they were confirmed by the Spanish sailors but which the
tribunal "would have deemed it but duty to reject" had they remained
unconfirmed. 93
Significantly, the testimony in this crucial extract is almost entirely
outside the personal knowledge of either Cereno or the Spanish sailors,
because it repeatedly relies on hearsay of the slaves' account of the revolt.
The testimony in this crucial extract notes, for example, that "this is
known and believed, because the negroes have said it," that certain acts
were performed "in a way the negroes afterwards told the deponent," that
"this also the negroes told him," and that the negresses "testified
themselves satisfied at the death of their master."'94 Moreover, the
statements contained in the extract are separated only by semicolons, and
the extract concludes with the statement, "all this is believed, because the
negroes have said it," suggesting that nearly all of the testimony in the
extract may be hearsay based on the statements of slaves. 95 These
passages at minimum suggest that hearsay slave statements were an
important source of the testimony attributed to Cereno. Furthermore,
unidentified documents appear to have been another source of this
testimony, as evidenced by the narrator's statement that a list of slave
names, descriptions, and ages was "compiled from certain recovered
96
documents of Aranda's."
91.
See FED. R. EviD. 801-807; BLACK's LAW DICTIONARY [s.v. "hearsay"] (6th ed. 1990).
92. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 111-12. This extract appears to reflect the evidence in the second
stage of a typical conspiracy trial, the first stage of which is to establish the existence of a conspiracy
and the second to establish the conspirators' respective participation in the conspiracy for purposes of
determining individual sentences. It is not surprising that Melville would be familiar with such legal
practices given his close relationship with his father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court and one of the most influential state court judges in American legal
history, and given that two of Melville's brothers were also successful lawyers in New York. See
ROBERT L. GALE, A HERMAN MELVILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA 282, 288, 409-410 (1995).
93. MELVILLE, supranote I, at 103.
94. Id.atlll-12.
95. Similarly, a later extract regarding the disappearance of Spanish sailor Luys Galgo indicates
that "this the negroes have since said." Id. at 112.
96. Id.at 104.
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It is significant when reading the references to slave statements in
"Benito Cereno" that critics have disagreed over whether the slaves were
deposed in the story. Alfred Konefsky concludes that the tribunal "does
not seek the testimony of Babo and the surviving slaves," 97 while Oliver
Scheiding concludes that the deposition transcript "clearly evidences that
the 'negroes' were actually heard by the court."98 Neither of these
conclusions appears to be accurate. The narrator indicates that the
deposition extracts all come from "the deposition of Benito Cereno," and
because it is "the first taken in the case," 99 the references to statements of
the slaves do not appear to reflect official testimony but instead suggest
that Cereno or others unofficially interrogated the slaves prior to the
proceedings, a practice typical of slave cases. The testimony indicates, for
example, that the slave Yau prepared the skeleton of slave-owner
Alexandro Aranda for display "in a way the negroes afterward told the
deponent." 1" It is equally difficult to conclude, however, that the tribunal
did not seek the official testimony of any of the slaves, because the
narrator states that the slaves' leader Babo "could not be forced to" speak
following his capture, suggesting his testimony was sought but that he
merely refused to speak, and because at one point the transcript indicates
that the negresses "testified" themselves satisfied at the death of their
owner. 10 1 The use of the word "testified" further suggests the
disconcerting conclusion that the slaves may have been officially
interrogated after Cereno and their testimony retrospectively used to
prepare the summary of his own, or that Cereno was interrogated on
multiple occasions not reflected in the transcript.
Not only is hearsay inherently unreliable, but the range of motives for
the slaves to distort their testimony, including threats of punishment and
promises of immunity, renders references to their statements in the story
particularly difficult to evaluate. By the 1850s, when "Benito Cereno"
was written, American courts considering the admissibility of slave
confessions recognized that "slaves were susceptible to peculiar pressures"
inherent in the master-slave relationship,"0 2 which cast "a certain degree of
discredit over any confession of guilt they may make, and renders it
unsafe if not improper, to act upon such evidence alone, without other
As Mark Tushnet has explained, "given
corroborating proof."'0 3
coerciveness, the voluntariness rule could be preserved [in slave cases]
only if third parties, particularly representatives of the state, were treated
97. Konefsky, supra note 80, at 1197.
98. Scheiding, supra note 11, at 127.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 103.
99.
100. Id. at 111-12.
101. Id. at 112, 116.
102. TUSHNET, supranote21,at127.
103. State v. Clarissa, 11 Ala. 57, 61-62 (1847).
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as independent of the master class," but given the relationship of race to
the system of slavery this was impossible."°4 As Peter Brooks has also
observed in his recent study of confession and the law, "confession and its
contexts have long been a problem to the law."' 5 Because even voluntary
confessions may arise "from a state of dependency, shame, and the need
for punishment, a condition that casts some doubt on the law's language of
autonomy and free choice," the act of confession may in its very nature
"undercut the notion of human agency that the law wishes to-and mustpromote.' ' 10 6 Because freedom was expressly denied to slaves, the doubt
confessions cast on the law's language of autonomy and free choice was
particularly magnified in slave cases.
D. The Spanish Inquisition and Torture
But in the words of Captain Ahab, "Hark ye yet again-the little lower
layer." 107 The investigation in "Benito Cereno" takes place in Lima, Peru,
the center of the Spanish Inquisition in South America at a time when the
Spanish Inquisition was still in force, and numerous allusions to the
Spanish Inquisition haunt the story. 108 The setting and the allusions to the
Spanish Inquisition suggest a tribunal that is both corrupt and in which
torture would have been a common method of extracting testimony from
witnesses, a circumstance which may serve to explain the defects and
irresolvable contradictions in the deposition extracts. In the eighteenth
century, the criminal proceedings in civilian legal systems frequently used
torture "for compelling testimony and eliciting proof."' 9 Inquisitorial
tribunals had the power to torture witnesses if they were suspected of
withholding testimony or "when they varied or retracted, or so
contradicted other witnesses that it was deemed necessary thus to ascertain
the truth."11 Judges also interrogated witnesses with a decided bias in
favor of guilt:
While thus with unwilling witnesses the inquisitor acted as counsel
for the prosecution, with those who were willing he made no attempt
to ascertain the truth of their stories. He asked leading questions
without reserve and abstained from any cross-examination that might
104.
TuSHNET, supranote21,at127.
105.
PETER BROOKS, TROUBLING CONFESSIONS: SPEAKING GUILT IN LAW AND LITERATURE 9
(2000).
106.
107.
Id. at 46, 63, 74.
MELVILLE, supra note 79, at 164.
108.
John Bernstein, Benito Cereno and the Spanish Inquisition, 16 NINETEENTH CENTURY
FICTION 346 (1962).
109. LEA, supra note 82, at 512; MERRYMAN, supra note 82, at 126-28.
110. 3 HENRY CHARLES LEA, A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF SPAIN 12-13 (1907), 4 id.at
540-41. The European equivalent of American "common law," known as the jus commune, was
formed from both Roman civil law and the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, but canon law
influenced the jus commune most in the areas of criminal law and the law of procedure. See
MERRYMAN, supra note 82, at 10-11.
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confuse the story and expose mendacity.... So long as witnesses
incriminated the accused, as a rule there was no effort to test their
accuracy or to obtain details of place and time or other points which
would facilitate against false charges.111
The inquisitorial process was based on the conviction that "it was better
that a hundred innocent persons should suffer than that one culprit should
escape," and required among other things that an accused identify his
accomplices, with the result that he was tortured until he revealed the
names of people he knew, who were then interrogated in the same fashion,
ever widening the circle of incrimination.1 12
Significantly, at the time "Benito Cereno" was written it was widely
known that torture was used in Lima until the Inquisition ended in the
nineteenth century.113 An October 1851 article in Harper'sNew Monthly
Magazine entitled "Lima and the Limanians," for example, vividly
describes the instruments of torture discovered at the end of the Inquisition
in Lima when the palace of the Inquisition was thrown open and "the
customary array of racks, pillories, scourges, gags, thumbscrews, and
other instruments of torture was found."' 14 Melville was also particularly
fascinated by Lima, which he believed "enjoyed an evil fame all along the
coast for a special inner destructiveness of its own, a special
' and in "The Town-Ho's Story" of Moby-Dick, members of
corruption,"1 15
the Golden Inn's audience in Lima refer to the "proverb all along this
coast, 'Corrupt as Lima."""
"Benito Cereno" contains numerous allusions to Dominican monks,
who were "principal sponsors of the Inquisition" known for the "excessive
111. 4 LEA, supra note 110, at 542-43. As Lea describes elsewhere:
The theory of the Inquisition, that the suspected man was to be hunted down and entrapped like a wild
beast, that his guilt was to be assumed, and that the efforts of the judges were to be directed solely to
obtaining against him sufficient evidence to warrant the extortion of a confession without allowing
him the means of defence-this theory became the admitted basis of criminal jurisprudence.
LEA, supra note 82, at 512-13.
112.
113.
LEA, supra note 82, at 514, 516.
LEA, supranote 82, at 541.
114.
Lima and the Limanians, HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, Oct. 17, 1851, at 598-609.
Similarly, according to a record of criminal proceedings against two slaves accused of murdering their
master in Spanish Louisiana in 1771, the slaves' confessions and the names of their accomplices were
extracted by putting them "on the rack," after which they were condemned to death by hanging. See
Laura L. Porteous, Torture in Spanish Criminal Procedure in Louisiana, 1771, 8 LA. HIST. Q. 5-22
(1925).
115.
116.
NEWTON ARViN, HERMAN MELVILLE 71 (2002).
MELVILLE, supra note 79, at 249. The Peruvian Inquisition's sale of offices may have
particularly exemplified this corruption, as by the late eighteenth century the offices of the Inquisition
"came to be a matter of almost open bargain and sale," culminating at last in an investigation of
inquisitor Pedro Zalduegui by the Suprema in the mid-I 790s, the time in which "Benito Cereno" is set.
HENRY CHARLES LEA, THE INQUISITION IN THE SPANISH DEPENDENCIES 372-73 (1908). Zalduegui
was "wholly illiterate" and began as a "sweeper and sacristan of the chapel of the tribunal," but
ultimately purchased the office of inquisitor for 14,000 ducats, and although the Suprema briefly
suspended him, it later restored him. Id. at 372-73.
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cruelty with which they punished suspected heretics," '17 and the
Dominican order was founded the same year the Fourth Lateran Council
instituted mandatory annual confession and an inquisition against
heresy.11 8 The San Dominick is named after the head of the Dominican
order and first appears to Captain Delano "like a white-washed
monastery," with "Black Friars pacing the cloisters," reminiscent of the
San Dominicans who were known as Black Friars in England," 9 and
Delano considers Cereno's behavior on the San Dominick "like that of his
imperial countryman, Charles V," under whose reign the Spanish
Inquisition was intensified. 2 ° In addition, Cereno's testimony of a ritual
ceremony in which Babo compels the Spanish sailors to view Alexandro
Aranda's skeleton resembles the public penance of an auto-de-f6, and the
condemned heretics of an auto-de-fi wore yellow garments known as
"senbenitos," reminiscent of "Don Benito" Cereno and the Spanish flag
Babo uses as a barber's cloth during a scene in which he shaves Cereno on
the San Dominick.'2 ' Melville also dedicated the last novel published
during his lifetime, The Confidence-Man, to "victims of Auto de Fe,"
which suggests the auto-de-ft held a peculiar significance for Melville.' 22
As critic John Bernstein notes, "it is through the use of the Spanish
Inquisition that Melville destroys any simple distinctions between good
and evil, appearance and reality, the past and the present," thereby raising
"Benito Cereno" "to a tale of the magnitude and complexity of Melville's
best works."' 23
Thus, both the textual and historical evidence suggest that the tribunal
before which Cereno testified may have been particularly corrupt and in
the practice of torturing witnesses. In such a context, the fact that the
tribunal initially doubted Cereno's testimony "for both learned and natural
reasons" is particularly important.' 24 It was customarily opined by civilian
treatise writers that if an accused lied during his interrogation, torture
could be used to compel him to testify truthfully, so that eventually any
suggestion that testimony was implausible or contradictory became a
"fearful herald of torture."' 125 On the San Dominick Cereno had lied to
117. H. Bruce Franklin, "Apparent Symbol ofDespotic Command": Melville's Benito Cereno, 34
NEW ENG. Q. 463-64 (1961): Bernstein, supra note 108, at 345-50.
118.
See I THE READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD LITERATURE AND THE
ARTS 307 (William Rose Bendt, ed., 1948); BROOKS, supra note 105, at 2, 15, 93.
119. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 48. See I THE READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, supra note 118, at
307; Bernstein, supra note 108, at 346.
120. MELVILLE, supranote 1, at 53; see Bernstein, supra note 108, at 349.
121. MELVILLE, supranote 1, at 107; see Bernstein,supra note 108, at 348.
122.
HERMAN MELVILLE, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE (Stephen Matterson ed.,
Penguin Classics 1991) (1857).
123. Bernstein, supra note 108, at 349.
124.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 103.
125. ALESSANDRO MANZONI, THE COLUMN OF INFAMY 125, 174 (Fr. Kenelm Foster, O.P. trans.,
Oxford Library of Italian Classics 1964).
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Delano, and perhaps Cereno's testimony before the Peruvian tribunal,
much like in the earlier narrative, was given "brokenly and obscurely, as
one in a dream," as is suggested by the tribunal's conclusion that Cereno
"raved of some things that could never have happened."' 12 6 Because the
tribunal ordered Cereno to appear before it as "captain of the ship San
Dominick"' 127 to satisfy the tribunal's inquiry into a disastrous voyage that
resulted in the loss of valuable lives and endangered the entire coast, it is
unlikely the tribunal would have remained passive in the face of an
28
equivocating captain, particularly given his prior deception. 1
The historical Cereno's potential liability for the Trial revolt, reflected
in a letter of April 6, 1805 from the Royal Consulado of Spain to the
Royal Governor of Santiago, Chile, confirms this potentially serious
liability of the literary Cereno.' 29 The Royal Consulado of Spain, a
merchant guild that the Spanish Crown vested with "special authority to
prevent slave uprisings" and which "performed the functions of judges in
cases involving merchant wrongdoing,"' 3 ° concluded that the damage of
the Trial revolt was caused by Cereno's failure to adequately guard the
slaves on the Trial, and the Consulado ordered that in the future half the
crew of Chilean slave ships must guard the slaves at all times under
penalty of "disciplinary action if ignored."''
Because slave rebellions
MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 55, 103.
127. Id.at 103.
128. To many inquisitorial tribunals, torture was a routine procedure for interrogating slaves and
criminal accomplices in particular, and in some tribunals even became the rule for interrogating all
witnesses. As Henry Charles Lea describes, slave testimony in ancient Rome was believed to be
unreliable unless it was given under torture, because "with slaves [torture] was not simply a
consequence of slavery, but a mode of confirming and rendering admissible the testimony of those
whose character was not sufficiently known to give their evidence credibility without it." LEA, supra
note 82, at 440. Lea describes, for example, how "a legist under Constantine states that gladiators and
others of similar occupation cannot be allowed to bear witness without torture." Id. Following similar
logic, later civilian authorities concluded that because criminals were disreputable witnesses, the
testimony of an accomplice was inadmissible unless torture "cleansed his disrepute." MANZONI, supra
note 125, at 161. This attitude toward torture eventually came to encompass all witnesses, however, as
Alessandro Manzoni recounts in the nineteenth-century historical novel The Column of Infamy, in
which he describes fifteenth-century Italian criticism of judges who "when they get a man in their
power ...refuse to speak to him until he is actually under torture." Id. at 125. The critique of evidence
obtained through torture is at least as old as Aristotle, who discussed the arguments against such
evidence in his Rhetoric:
What is true of torture of every kind alike, [is] that people under its compulsion tell lies quite as often
as they tell the truth, sometimes persistently refusing to tell the truth, sometimes recklessly making a
false charge in order to be let off sooner .... We must say that evidence under torture is not
trustworthy, the fact being that many men whether thick-witted, tough-skinned, or stout of heart
endure their ordeal nobly, while cowards and timid men are full of boldness till they see the ordeal of
these others: so that no trust can be placed in evidence under torture.
ARISTOTLE, THE RHETORIC AND THE POETICS OF ARISTOTLE 1376-1377 (Edward P.J. Corbett trans.,
Modem Library 1984).
129. Joshua Leslie & Sterling Stuckey, Avoiding the Tragedy of Benito Cereno: The Official
Response to Babo's Revolt (Maria del Valle trans.), 3 CRIM. JUST. HIST. 130-131 (1982). Despite
different spellings, the Tryal, identified by Amasa Delano, and the Trial, identified by Leslie and
Stuckey, refer to the same historical slave ship.
130. Id. at 127.
131. Id. at 130-31. The Consulado's letter adds that "the Navy Commandant of Callao department
126.
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were a common occurrence in the oceanic slave trade, slave ships
frequently took additional precautions to prevent such rebellions,
including ample arsenals and crew to guard the slaves, careful
confinement of the slaves below deck, and routine searches of slave
quarters. 132 By contrast, Cereno admits in "Benito Cereno" that "none [of
the slaves] wore fetters, because the owner, his friend Aranda, told him
they were all tractable."' 3 3 The fact that Cereno was in significant danger
before the Peruvian tribunal is also reflected in the references in his
testimony to the claims of duress and efforts to mitigate losses from the
revolt, including his testimony that he endeavored "not to omit any means
to preserve the lives of the remaining whites," and that his testimony was
intended "to show the court that from the beginning to the end of the
revolt, it was impossible for the deponent and his men to act otherwise
than they did."' 3 4
In addition, there is some evidence in "Benito Cereno" that the Peruvian
tribunal may have used bodily force during its inquiry. The narrator notes,
for example, that Babo "uttered no sound, and could not be forced to," that
Benito Cereno was "pressedby the judges" to look at Babo until "he
fainted," and that when Cereno's testimony was finished he was "broken
in body and mind."' 35 The word "pressed" not only evokes the idea of
physical or mental pressure, but may also allude to a particular form of
torture known as peine forte et dure, by which the body of one who
refuses to plead to a crime was crushed with a heavy load of stones or
iron, a punishment also referred to as "pressing to death."' 36 In an
infamous American example of this practice, Giles Corey was "pressed to
death" during the Salem witch trials,' 37 and as recounted in a famous
American ballad of 1692, instead of confessing requested "more weight"
for a quicker death.' 38 Similarly, the phrase "broken in body and mind"
is to investigate the carrying out of this method, and is to compel the captains who do not meet it to do
so." Id.at 130. The Consulado also ordered the separation of "Ladinos," or slaves who spoke Spanish
and had "been in the new world for some years," commenting that "experience has proven that in
cases of mutiny the principal initiators have been the 'Ladinos,"' not the "raw Africans" Cereno
thought were responsible for the revolt. Id. at 128, 130-31. As indicated earlier, Babo and other slaves
in "Benito Cereno" speak Spanish.
132. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REBELLION, supra note 20, at 551-52; David
Richardson, ShipboardRevolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 58 WM. & MARY Q.
73 (2001); Wish, supra note 17, at 301.
133. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 104; cf Wish, supra note 17, at 300 ("Some slave ship captains
put their trust in the relative docility of certain African peoples.").
134. MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 108, 113.
135. Id. at114,116.
136. BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 1132 (6th ed. 1990).
137. COLLECTIONS OF THE MASSACHUSETrS HISTORICAL SOCIETY FOR THE YEAR 1799, at 269
(Samuel Hall 1800).
138. The following stanzas of "The Ballad of Giles Corey" reflect the use of this punishment:
"Giles Corey," said the magistrate,
"What have thou here to plead
To these who now accuse thy soul
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evokes the image of a body broken on the rack, which, as Peter Brooks
notes, is the "very emblem of inquisition."' 3 9 These traces of force are
consistent with the numerous allusions to the Spanish Inquisition and
inquisitorial procedures that used torture to compel testimony, and this
connection not only casts further doubt on the reliability of the testimony
presented in the deposition extracts in "Benito Cereno," but may provide
the best explanation of their defects and contradictions.
III. PATTERNS OF DISTORTION
The numerous defects and contradictions reflected in the deposition
extracts in "Benito Cereno" closely resemble the patterns of distortion in
the records of historical slave rebellion trials, and these patterns provide an
important index for interpreting Melville's use of the deposition in the
story. The deposition extracts contain numerous indications, for example,
that like the Charleston court in the Vesey conspiracy trials, the Peruvian
tribunal in "Benito Cereno" relied on hearsay testimony of slaves and
missing documents to craft a more coherent narrative of the San
Dominick's voyage than the proceedings supported. The summary form
of the transcript provides a ready means for the tribunal to construct
Cereno's testimony through leading questions and through its dictation of
the summary to the court reporter, rendering undiscoverable the sort of
detailed alterations reflected in the Denmark Vesey trial records, in which
the court edited the manuscript testimony of the trials, "omitting words
that are present in the transcript, adding words that are not present, and
' 140
changing words, punctuation, capitalization, and word order."
Furthermore, because Cereno was "the first witness," 14' the appearance of
slave testimony also raises the possibility that the transcript may have
Of crimes and horrid deed?"
Giles Corey-he said not a word,
No single word spoke he.
"Giles Corey," said the magistrate,
"We'll press it out of thee."
They got them then a heavy beam,
They laid it on his breast.
They loaded it with heavy stones,
And hard upon him pressed.
"More weight" now said this wretched man,
"More weight" again he cried.
And he did no confession make
But wickedly he died.
MICHAEL V. USCHAN, THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS 29 (2004); see also COTTON MATHER, THE
WITCHCRAFT DELUSION IN NEW ENGLAND: ITS RISE, PROGRESS, AND TERMINATION 174 (Roxbury,
Mass., 1866).
139. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 114; BROOKS, supranote 105, at 69.
140. Johnson, supra note 46, at 941.
141.
MELVILLE, supra note l,at 103.
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been retrospectively supplemented by these sources. The secrecy that
surrounds the references to slave statements in "Benito Cereno" also
suggests parallels to the secret interrogations of Nat Turner and the slave
witnesses in the Vesey conspiracy trials, indicating that the Peruvian
tribunal in the story may have carefully built its case against Babo and the
other slaves before using Cereno's testimony to confirm it, much as
Thomas Gray apparently used The Confessions of Nat Turner to confirm
details of the Southampton rebellion that Gray had previously published in
his Constitutional Whig letter.
In addition, Cereno's testimony that Babo was the leader of the San
Dominick revolt, "the plotter from first to last," who "ordered every
murder, and was the helm and keel of the revolt,"' 42 closely parallels the
construction of leaders of slave rebellions in historical slave rebellion
records, such as the construction of Nat Turner as the "author," "contriver
and head,"' 43 of the Southampton rebellion, and of Denmark Vesey as the
"author and original instigator" of the Charleston conspiracy, from whom
"all orders emanated." '
In his edits to the transcript of the historical
Cereno's deposition taken from A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Melville emphasizes Babo's central
role in the revolt by replacing numerous passages in the historical
transcript that refer to "they" or to "the negroes" to refer instead to "the
negro Babo." The testimony that Babo was the "helm and keel" of the
revolt also appears in the extract discussed above that is based almost
entirely on hearsay derived from slaves who had significant motives to
distort their testimony regarding Babo. In a similar vein, the testimony
that Babo "ordered every murder" is belied by Cereno's testimony that
one of the murders during the revolt was spontaneously committed by
slaves who were suffering from heat and dehydration:
On the fifth day of the calm, all on board suffering much from the
heat, and want of water, and five having died in fits, and mad, the
negroes became irritable, and for a chance gesture, which they
deemed suspicious-though it was harmless-made by the mate,
Raneds,
to the deponent, in the act of handing a quadrant, they killed
145
him.
Importantly, the narrator of Melville's earlier novel Typee describes thirst
as the most debilitating of all conditions: "I am aware of no feeling, either
of pleasure or of pain, that so completely deprives one of all power to
resist its impulses, as this same raging thirst." 1" The desperate conditions
142.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 112.
143.
Gray, supra note 22, at 245, 262.
SCHENCK, supra note 57, at 135.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 108, 112.
HERMAN MELVILLE, TYPEE: A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE 52 (John Bryant ed., Penguin
144.
145.
146.
Books 1996) (1846).
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on the San Dominick may lead the reader of "Benito Cereno" to question
the simplicity of Cereno's claim that Babo was the sole plotter, "whose
brain," "that hive of subtlety," "had schemed and led the revolt," among
the many slaves on board.' 47
It is also important to recognize that the distortion of official records in
slave rebellion trials may be explained not only by private motives, but
also by the complicated motives public authorities had to protect the
political and commercial interests that rebellions threatened. With regard
to the historical Trial inquiry, for example, Joshua Leslie and Sterling
Stuckey write that considering the importance of slavery to the Spanish
empire, the Consulado, which held special authority to prevent slave
rebellions, "felt the need to use its ties to the Crown to threaten the
Governor [of Santiago], whose motives it considered suspect, in the
aftermath of the revolt."' 48 By referring the case to the Consulado, the
Governor of Santiago had apparently attempted to absolve himself of
responsibility for implementing the proper precautions against rebellions
by implying that it was the Consulado's responsibility to implement such
precautions. 4 9 In response, the Consulado cited a royal decree that
granted it jurisdiction over "all tribunals, judges, magistrates, political and
military heads," including the Governor, to accomplish its mandate, and
denied that it had "given any cause, "either directly or indirectly, for any
accusation of negligence in the carrying out of its duties."' 50 The
Consulado stated that it was willing to overlook the fact that "regular legal
procedure" had not been followed in the case, and concluded by
announcing its hope that in the future the Governor "will demand that the
Consulado be treated with the respect and preeminence it merits as a body
empowered and honored by our sovereign."''
As Leslie and Stuckey
describe the tension in this exchange, which resembles that between the
Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders and the Governor of
South Carolina regarding the proceedings in the Denmark Vesey trials,
"the response suggests the two authorities related to each other in a dense
field of political intrigue," demonstrating "the corrupting influence of
slavery to social relations in post-Renaissance Europe at the heart of
Melville's Benito Cereno.' 52 Because the politics of slavery added a
"dense field of political intrigue" to the interests threatened by slave
rebellions, the authorities presiding over slave rebellion trials had
powerful incentives to swiftly conclude their investigations and to
understate the significance of rebellions in their official records, regardless
147.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 116.
148.
149.
150.
151.
152.
Leslie & Stuckey, supranote 129, at 128.
Id.
Id.
Id. at 131.
Id. at 128.
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of what actions they might have taken to prevent them from recurring in
the future.
IV. ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES
The reader who is led to doubt Cereno's testimony regarding the San
Dominick revolt and to ask, as Delano does of the story Cereno tells on the
San Dominick, "if that story was not true, what was the truth?" will find
suggestions of alternative narratives throughout "Benito Cereno."' 5 3
Perhaps most startling are numerous suggestions of conspiracy between
the Spaniards and slaves on the San Dominick, as Delano himself suspects
in the middle of the story after the facial expression of one of the Spanish
sailors suggests to Delano that the sailor may be inclined to warn Delano
of some plot Cereno is maturing below deck:
But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then
Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were
too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to
apostatize5 4from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with
negroes? 1
Contrary to Delano's belief that it was unheard of for whites to conspire
with blacks in slave rebellions, as one writer notes, "white men played an
important role in many Negro uprisings, frequently furnishing arms, and
even leadership, as well as inspiration."' 55 Toward the end of the first
installment of "Benito Cereno," Delano questions whether the San
Dominick had "unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession," and later
fears that it is a "haunted pirate-ship," and that Cereno is in "collusion"
with the slaves. 5 6 Although Delano later dismisses these thoughts as
implausible, his quick dismissal of a conspiracy between the Spaniards
and slaves suggests that perhaps the thoughts were merely too unsettling,
and as the narrator describes Delano's attempt to dismiss other mysteries
on the San Dominick, he "strove, by ignoring the symptoms, to get rid of
the malady."' 57
In fact, on close inspection "Benito Cereno" contains numerous
allusions to piracy. Captain Delano's whale-boat is named the Rover, the
original name for pirate and probably an allusion to James Fenimore
Cooper's 1828 pirate novel The Red Rover,i5 8 and Delano's chief mate,
whom Delano appoints to lead the party of American sailors to recapture
153. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 68.
154. Id.at 75.
155. Wish, supra note 17, at 310.
156. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 68, 77, 87.
157. Id. at 77.
158. 2 WEEKLEY, supra note 67, at 1254; JAMEs FENIMORE COOPER, THE RED ROVER, A TALE
(Thomas Philbrick & Marianne Philbrick eds., State Univ. of New York Press 1991) (1828).
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the San Dominick after the chaos that ensues when Cereno leaps
overboard in the final installment, is a former "privateer's-man, and, as his
enemies whispered, a pirate."' 59 There are also suggestions that Delano's
original decision to investigate the San Dominick is motivated by the hope
of commercial salvage gain. The narrator refers to the "lawlessness" of
the harbor of St. Maria where Delano first notices the San Dominick, for
example, and Delano only decides to board after the San Dominick's
dangerous proximity to the reef reveals her "no wonted freebooter on this
ocean."' I This commercial motive is also evinced in Delano's declaration
to his sailors, apparently without consulting Cereno, that if they recapture
the San Dominick they will receive a portion of the ship and its cargo.161
Significantly, in the investigation of the Tryal revolt on which Melville
based "Benito Cereno," the historical Cereno alleged that Delano boarded
the Tryal with precisely such a motive and Cereno took the depositions of
three prison convicts who swore Delano was a "pirate. "162
These allusions to piracy also appear in the behavior of the American
sailors who pursue and recapture the San Dominick from its control by the
slaves in the final installment of the story. Specifically, according to
Cereno's testimony, the American sailors show no surprise or hesitation
when during the recapture of the San Dominick they shoot two of the
Spaniards upon concluding that the Spaniards have conspired with the
slaves in the revolt. In one scene, for example, when one of the Spaniards
calls to the American boats from the mizzen-rigging of the San Dominick,
"'don't board,' lest upon their boarding the negroes should kill him," the
American sailors conclude that "he some way favored the cause of the
negroes" and shoot him.163 Similarly, in a scene in which the slaves
reportedly make another Spaniard stand on the bulwarks with a hatchet
tied to his hand "in a questionable attitude," the American sailors conclude
he is "a renegade seaman" and shoot him.' 6 Moreover, because Cereno
testifies that some of the slaves "were killed after the capture and reanchoring at night, when shackled to the ring-bolts on deck; that these
' 65
deaths were committed by the sailors, ere they could be prevented,"'
Oliver Scheiding suggests Spaniards who had conspired with the slaves
murdered potential slave witnesses when the San Dominick was
159.
160.
161.
162.
MELVILLE, supranote 1, at 101.
Id. at 47.
Id. at 101.
DELANO, supra note 77, at 329.
163.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 113. In A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres, Amasa Delano recounts that the chief mate "ran up the mizzen rigging of the
Tryal as high as the cross jack yard, and called out in Spanish, 'Don't board,' which "induced our
people to believe that he favored the cause of the Negroes; they fired at him, and two balls took
effect." DELANO, supra note 77, at 327.
164. MELVILLE, supranote 1, at 113.
165. Id.
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recaptured in order to silence them."6 Not only does the transcript invite
these interpretations, but it suggests Spaniards capable of such murder
would readily falsify their testimony before the Peruvian tribunal, which
would be far more likely to believe the testimony of the Spaniards than
that of the slaves.
In the second installment of the story, when Delano begins to suspect
Cereno of a malign motive, Delano also alludes to Guy Fawkes, leader of
the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which a group of English
Catholics conspired to assassinate James I and the Protestant aristocracy of
England by using gunpowder to blow up the English Parliament.
Specifically, as Delano waits for his whale-boat to return to the San
Dominick, he reflects on Cereno's mysterious behavior on the San
Dominick and muses that "the very word Spaniard has a curious,
conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it." '67 This allusion is not accidental.
In 1841, shortly before Melville wrote "Benito Cereno," William Harrison
Ainsworth published a historical novel entitled Guy Fawkes; Or, The
Gunpowder Treason, which questions the official version of the
Gunpowder Plot and portrays Fawkes sympathetically. 6 8 Furthermore,
the irony was surely not lost on Melville that his literary Delano associates
Cereno with Guy Fawkes's Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the
Protestant aristocracy of England in the Gunpowder Plot, while the
historical Delano was a descendant of the Protestant Huguenots 169 who
conspired against the Catholic aristocracy of France and whose very name
derives from words meaning "oath companion" or "confederate.' ' 70 The
St. Bartholomew Day Massacre of the Huguenots by the French Catholics
in 1572 is even specifically evoked at the end of "Benito Cereno" by a
reference to the burial of slave-owner Alexandro Aranda's bones in the
vaults of St. Bartholomew's church.' 7
Finally, although presumably Cereno's successful escape from the San
Dominick would have calmed his troubled nerves, the last installment of
"Benito Cereno" reveals that Cereno remains troubled even after his safe
arrival in Lima, raising significant doubts regarding his relationship to the
166. Scheiding, supra note 11, at 127. Similarly, Edgar Dryden notes that the behavior of the
sailors toward the surviving slaves after they have been captured and shackled to the ring bolts of the
deck further complicates the unanswered questions Cereno's deposition raises about the relationship
between slaves and crew. See DRYDEN, supra note 12, at 203.
167. MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 79.
168.
WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH, GuY FAWKES; OR, THE GUNPOWDER TREASON (Paris,
Baudry's European Library 1841). Furthermore, a confession was tortured out of Guy Fawkes, and
Ainsworth devotes a lengthy chapter to depicting "How Guy Fawkes Was Put to the Torture." Id. at
264-76.
169. The Delano family, including the historical Amasa Delano, traces its genealogy to Philippe
De la Noye, a Huguenot who arrived at Plymouth in 1621 on the Fortune. See GEOFFREY C. WARD,
BEFORE THE TRUMPET: YOUNG FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, 1882-1905, at 66 & n.2 (1985).
170. 1 WEEKLEY, supra note 67, at 734.
171.
MELVILLE, supra note i, at 117; see 1 THE READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, supra note 118, at
79.
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slaves and the veracity of his testimony before the Peruvian tribunal.
During the earlier narrative while Cereno is on the San Dominick, he
cannot look at Delano, but "with every token of craven discomposure
dropped his eyes to the deck."' 17 2 If Cereno's testimony is accepted, this is
presumably explained by the fact that Cereno was compelled to deceive
Delano and feared for his life if he disclosed the truth of the slave revolt.
During the investigation in Lima, however, Cereno similarly refuses to
look at Babo until "when pressed by the judges he fainted,"' 73 and
although in this instance Delano's behavior may be explained as that of
one unable to face his assailant, the parallel to the incident in the earlier
narrative suggests deceit. It is only during Cereno's voyage to Lima after
he leaps overboard and the San Dominick is recaptured that, "relaxed from
constraint," he "showed some signs of regaining health with free-will," but
the narrator later remarks that Cereno suffers a "decided relapse" shortly
before arriving in Lima.'
As Edgar Dryden notes, when Cereno returns
to Lima "he finds only another and larger 'San Dominick,""' 7 5 and
Cereno's brief recovery during this passage to Lima suggests pressures in
Lima that parallel those on the San Dominick. The text provides no
satisfactory explanation for the persistence of Cereno's troubled nerves
after his safe arrival in Lima, only that it is caused by the shadow of "the
negro."' 76 These and other passages of the text suggest deeper narratives
than the deposition extracts explain and leave the reader like the San
Dominick in the earlier narrative, "deserted... in unknown waters, to
sultry calms,""'7 without the means to navigate between appearance and
reality.
There are numerous interpretive possibilities that would account for the
suggestions of conspiracy in the story. Could Cereno have killed the
slaves' owner Alexandro Aranda and the Spanish officers as part of a plot
to seize possession of the vessel and its valuable cargo, only to later
abandon the venture and blame the losses on a slave revolt? The
concealment of white crimes motivated many historical slave rebellion
claims, such as the death of Captain Thomas Gould during the Hope revolt
in 1764, which newspaper accounts first attributed to a mutiny of two
white crew members before later accounts attributed the death to a slave
revolt.178 Or could the slaves have mutinied and Cereno later joined their
cause, as suggested by Cereno's testimony that he and the Spaniards
agreed "to draw up a paper, signed by the deponent and the sailors who
172.
173.
174.
175.
176.
177.
178.
MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 66, 115.
Id. at 116.
Id. at 103, 114.
DRYDEN, supra note 12, at 207.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 116.
Id. at 56.
See ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REBELLION, supra note 20, at 252-53.
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could write, and also by the negro Babo, for himself and all the blacks, in
which the deponent obliged himself to carry them to Senegal, and they not
to kill any more, and he formally to make over to them the ship, with the
cargo."' 79 The signing of this paper, like other passages of the testimony,
suggests a deeper collaboration between the Spaniards and slaves than the
extracts explain. It could suggest, for example, that not unlike Cereno's
accusation of the slaves during his testimony, Cereno and the Spanish
sailors, "though not in the first place knowing to the design of the revolt,
when it was accomplished, approved it." 18 Or could Cereno and other
Spaniards have first mutinied, then lost control to the slaves in the chaos
that ensued? Would the Peruvian tribunal have been inclined to minimize
or conceal any white complicity in the events on the San Dominick to
preserve public order and its own reputation as the authority responsible
for preventing such revolts? These and other alternative narratives lie just
below the surface of the story and may serve to explain many of the
defects and contradictions in the deposition extracts.
V. "TRUE HISTORY"
In "Benito Cereno," law, narrative, and history fuse like the "past,
present, and future"'' in Cereno's dramatic leap into Delano's whale-boat
the Rover in the third installment of the story, reflecting Melville's
deepening concern with legal and historiographical issues that culminated
in Billy Budd. As Hayden White has observed regarding the intimate
relationship between law, narrative, and history, "the more historically
self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the
question of the social system and the law that sustains it, the authority of
this law and its justification, and threats to the law occupy his
attention."' 82 By placing Cereno's account of the San Dominick revolt in
the form of an official transcript and simultaneously undermining its claim
to be the "true history" of the story, Melville not only questions the
political foundation of slavery but demonstrates the corruption of law that
a diminution of legal agency entails.
Because by the 1850s when Melville wrote "Benito Cereno" historical
slave rebellion records had long been characterized by "exaggeration,
distortion, and censorship,"' 8 3 as exemplified by The Confessions of Nat
Turner, the Official Report of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy trials, and
numerous other slave rebellion records, a slave rebellion narrative
179.
180.
181.
182.
MELVILLE, supra note 1,at 108.
Id. atlI 1I.
Id. at 98.
183.
APTHEKER, supra note 16, at 150.
HAYDEN WHITE, THE CONTENT OF THE FORM: NARRATIVE DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL
REPRESENTATION 13 (1987).
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provided Melville with the ideal form for a commentary on the
construction and manipulation of agency in the legal process. In "Benito
Cereno," Melville provides the reader with ample evidence to question the
credibility of Cereno and the Spanish sailors, the Peruvian tribunal's
corruption and lack of procedural formalities during the proceedings, and
the many layers of mediation between the story and the reader as reflected
in the fragmented, summary, and translated form of Cereno's testimony
and its reliance on hearsay. Thus, despite the authority the deposition
carries by being identified as an official legal document, its authority is
simultaneously undermined by other textual features.
In Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel teaches that
law is a precondition for both narrative and history because it is only in a
society with laws that "distinct transactions take place, accompanied by
such a clear consciousness of them as supplies the ability and suggests the
necessity of an enduring record.""' Accordingly, Hegel describes the
absence of history in Indian literature as the result of India's inordinate
dependency on the caste system:
Where that iron bondage of distinctions derived from nature prevails,
the connection of society is nothing but wild arbitrariness,-transient
activity,-or rather the play of violent emotion without any goal of
advancement or development. Therefore no intelligent reminiscence,
no object for Mnemosyne presents itself, and imagination-confused
though profound-expiates in a region, which, to be capable of
History, must have had an aim within the domain of Reality, and, at
the same time, of substantial Freedom.' 85
Hegel highlights the necessary relationship between the autonomous
agency on which law must depend and the necessity of maintaining
distinct records of human actions which motivates both narrative and
history. Similarly, Hayden White has remarked that narrativity, "whether
of the fictional or factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system
against which or on behalf of which the typical agents of a narrative
account dictate."'' 86 Because slaves were deprived of the autonomous
agency on which law, narrative, and history depend by virtue of their
legally delimited agency, both the ability and the necessity of creating an
enduring record of the transactions concerning them was diminished if not
destroyed, and the procedural laxity of slave trials became an inevitable
concomitant of their legal status.
When trial records lack sufficient integrity they fail to achieve the
closure that they are designed to provide. But as Robert Ferguson has
184.
G.W.F. HEGEL, LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 64 (J. Sibree trans., G. Bell &
Sons 1914); see also Robert Weisberg, ProclaimingTrials as Narratives: Premises and Pretenses, in
LAW'S STORIES, supra note 10, at 61, 77-78.
185. HEGEL, supra note 184, at64-65.
186. WHITE, supra note 182, at 13.
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observed, the various levels of explanation in courtroom transcripts
resemble the layers of human consciousness in which surface narratives
must always suppress alternative narratives that struggle for recognition:
The surface narrative of a courtroom transcript is not unlike the
consciousness of an individual; both offer the official record of what
passes for explanation, and both know themselves to be under distinct7
pressure from other levels of explanation that need to be contained.'
The deposition extracts at the end of "Benito Cereno" invite the reader to
consider these "other levels" of explanation, or in Captain Ahab's words,
the "little lower layer" that was such a familiar trope of Melville's prose,
implicating the reader in evaluating not only the sufficiency of the
evidence on which the official account of the San Dominick's voyage is
founded, but what the inconsistencies in an official account of the voyage
reveals about the power relations both on the San Dominick and in Lima.
Accordingly, the reader of "Benito Cereno" is placed in the perilous
position of Delano in the story, constantly questioning when and under
what circumstances the "imputation of malign evil in man" is justified,
while entangled in the pursuit of a "true history" that, like the Rover's
return trip to the San Dominick in the middle of the story, is ever
"lengthened by the continual recession of its goal."' 8 8 The absence of a
reliable record of the story's "true history" gives "Benito Cereno" a
treacherous complexity that places it among Melville's greatest works,
demanding that the story and the "dreary documents at the end"'8 9 be read
with a careful eye for the potential exaggerations, distortions, and
censorship that lie submerged in official records.
187.
188.
189.
Ferguson, supra note 10, at 89.
MELVILLE, supra note 1, at 47, 70, 103.
BERTHOFF, supra note 14, at 153.
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